Announcement

ESO Web Pages Redesigned

21 October 2014

After weeks of development ESO has a new design for its web pages. The main motivation for the changes was to give the site a more user-friendly interface and to make it more mobile-friendly. The new responsive design adapts itself automatically to the resolution of the display that the visitor uses — a technology widely adopted nowadays when most people use smartphones or tablets to visit websites.

The overall goal was to create a more functional web page with an updated and striking design. This allows ESO’s remarkable facilities, and the science results coming from them, to be presented in the best possible way.

The new design gives the ESO web pages a less organisational look and adopts a style closer to that of a magazine or an online newspaper. This is especially true for the redesign of the pages containing the press releases and announcements. This way it is easier to highlight the many achievements, scientific breakthroughs and attractive visual material that ESO is creating on an almost daily basis.

The new interface is touch-friendly, in terms of both layout and interaction, but still contains the same content available on the old web pages. We hope that the new design will make it more attractive to new users, but will not confuse the users that we already have by keeping the same structure on the web page. There have been a few small changes, for example the former menu “Science with ESO telescopes” can now be found in “Discoveries” and “Working at ESO” has been shortened to “Jobs”.

One of the big changes, and a significant step forward for users who use the web pages in a language other than English, is the disappearance of the ESO mini-pages. On the new web pages you can now select a language from the main menu and this setting is saved in a cookie. Now if users go to a page that is not available in their language, they will automatically be redirected to the original English page and informed that this content is not available in their language. Previously a visitor who was not using English would not have able to access the English web pages by this route.

Changing the language support was a long-term aim from our side and we’re happy that the 19 languages available are now supported in a more natural way.

Links

Contacts

Lars Lindberg Christensen
Head of ESO ePOD
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6761
Cell: +49 173 3872 621
Email: lars@eso.org

About the Announcement

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Images

Screenshot of the new homepage
Screenshot of the new homepage